Maybe I am missing something, but what is the argument ISPs have for this?
FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
161–170 of 343 posts
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#162I hope there will be companies, upon being asked by an ISP to pay more for higher priority in their network, who will tell them to get the f*k off and advocate usage of VPN and anonymisers for their users so they're not identified as US residents.
Which only works until your VPN provider also refuses to pay up and gets put in the slow lane for having too much traffic.
Business opportunity: Start VPN service and pay for the 'faster lane'. Advertise to users that they won't have throttled anything. ISPs become the utility that they should be.(Although at a higher cost to the end user)
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Why does the water supplied to my home come in clear and polluted varieties? - Why does the electricity supplied to my office come in normal power and brown power versions? Oh, wait.
Those examples are funny, because, e.g. our water infrastructure is the subject of underinvestment to the tune of $55 billion a year: http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2011/12/asce-report-o... When you make an industry a public utility, and eliminate market-rate profit incentives, you get underinvestment, which is exactly what we see in water, power, etc: http://www.asce.org/failuretoact . You can talk all you w…
Investors and shareholders are not in favor of pouring billions of dollars a year into infrastructure either. That's why we're seeing this rent seeking behavior, and one reason why we have slower speeds than other modern nations.
Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this comment. Can you explain?
By agreeing to incorporate DRM in the browser Mozilla is, according to that comment, agreeing to let the problem get worse. One of the characteristics of cable TV is, precisely, that you don't get access to the content if you don't pay. DRM is one way of achieving this, and Mozilla in this case is accepting that without even a struggle. If I understood the parent comment correctly, that is.
This is incorrect.
Mozilla fought the DRM implementation more than any other browser. They were at the point where they unfortunately had to implement it, otherwise their user base wouldn't be able to access services like netflix etc. At that point it's better to keep your user base instead of them switching to another browser and having no voice.
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adding to the confusion, the NYT has an article up right now which seems to report the opposite. To quote from the NYT article lede: "WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 on Thursday to invite public comment on a set of proposed rules aimed at guaranteeing an open Internet, prohibiting high-speed Internet service providers from blocking or discriminating against legal content flowing through t…
You are reading it correctly. And the NYT seems to be reporting it correctly. While the text is not published yet anywhere I can see, the FCC fact sheet states that the proposal (direct quotes with only formatting/presentation changes) [1]: - Proposes to retain the definitions and scope of the 2010 rules, which governed broadband Internet access service providers, but not services like enterprise services, Internet t…
>Tentatively concludes that priority service offered exclusively by a broadband provider to an affiliate should be considered illegal until proven otherwise.
This is still not a good proposition though. They're saying you can't offer improved service to "exclusively" your affiliates, but you can allow anyone with enough money to pay for "improved" (aka normal) service.
Things are very confusing right now but we have not made progress on Net Neutrality yet. Keep contacting the FCC and let them know that this is not good enough.
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that a network that can stream 20Mbit continuously to every customer (so they always can get the "advertised" bandwidth) would be absurdly expensive, and rates would have to go up accordingly Then maybe they should advertise a different bandwidth?
This is sort of like car advertisements, that always touts "350hp V8" or whatever, even though in the vast majority of real-life usage you can use that power for at most a second or two at some freeway onramp or in a passing lane. Saying that the connection is technically capable of 20Mbit/s is different from guaranteeing 20Mbit/s in any possible usage situation. The problem with my analogy is that people generally h…
So you're ok with buying a 350hp v8 that can only really ever do 50hp? Except on toll roads you have to pay for again that you may use 'up to' 350hp, but you're still not guaranteed that.
The FCC isn't talking about speed that's a red herring. It's about access. What if the FCC say "Fine consumers must have a minimum of 1gbps" you're like "Huzar" and the FCC say "And anyone who pays a huge amount of money get a minimum of 100gps." ..hold the phone
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#167"And he promised a series of measures to ensure the new paid prioritization practices are done fairly and don't harm consumers." I have a measure in mind that won't harm consumers. Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request. (Gee that sounds a lot like net neutrality.) Anything less is open for abuse. Perhaps "Discrimination" is a good w…
CDNs are essentially identical (technologically and economically) to what Netflix bought from Comcast: http://clipperhouse.com/2014/05/07/what-netflix-bought-from-... To my mind, I can’t imagine a rule that describes a fast lane that doesn’t also describe a CDN.
The difference to me is that CDNs increase the availability of content to everyone. If CDNs did not exist, the content would still be available.
Comcast is talking about "not decreasing" the availability of content. Some businesses can afford to pay to use already-paid-for infrastructure. Others are out of luck, and their content is not fully accessible. If Comcast did not exist, current users would not be able to request content, but the market could provide a solution in an alternate ISP. With Comcast the market cannot provide a solution, because it is actively being suppressed by Comcast.
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
CDNs increase the overall capacity of the network by caching content closer to its destination. This benefits everyone, even the traffic that is not cached by the CDN because it reduces congestion for everyone. The behavior we are worried about is zero sum (where some packets get prioritized and others lose out), or even negative sum (where some packets get held for ransom.)
That’s true, and it’s also true when Netflix buys a dedicated circuit to Comcast. Their traffic is no longer going over the other circuits. Not saying it’s the right thing to do, but that it’s functionally the same. It’s also functionally the same to say that any traffic not on the CDN is in a slow lane or being held ransom, in the sense that it will be congested until the publisher pays.
No, as far as I can tell the incentives in the two scenarios are very different.
The transparence on what is being payed for and why some sites are fast and some are slow is not the same for Comcast's subscribes in the two scenarios either.
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
By agreeing to incorporate DRM in the browser Mozilla is, according to that comment, agreeing to let the problem get worse. One of the characteristics of cable TV is, precisely, that you don't get access to the content if you don't pay. DRM is one way of achieving this, and Mozilla in this case is accepting that without even a struggle. If I understood the parent comment correctly, that is.
This is incorrect. Mozilla fought the DRM implementation more than any other browser. They were at the point where they unfortunately had to implement it, otherwise their user base wouldn't be able to access services like netflix etc. At that point it's better to keep your user base instead of them switching to another browser and having no voice.
You raise a good point. I'm not smart enough to give a good reply to the issue on my own, so instead I'm going to quote the relevant part of the FSFs statement[1] from a different discussion[2]:
> We understand that Mozilla is afraid of losing users. Cory Doctorow points out[3] that they have produced no evidence to substantiate this fear or made any effort to study the situation. More importantly, popularity is not an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit with an ethical mission.
[1] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-condemns-partnership-between-mo...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7749108
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-cl...
Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
#170The investment in Obama by tech luminaries must be a huge disappointment.
Obama proclaiming his "commitment to net neutrality" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-mW1qccn8k
Tom Wheeler, the FCC Chairman, was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the majority Democratic U.S. Senate in 2013 (lead by Harry Reid who also claims to be pro net neutrality) is going to kill Net Neutrality.
Please take some time to remind democratic politicians & supporters why practicing this sort of politics will come with a price.